Law enforcement uses various pieces of equipment as indicators of wrongdoing or violations of laws by the public. Basically the results are used as probable cause for further investigation. Radar guns, brethalyzers, etc, are accepted as accurate enough for this because they produce standard, reproducible results and that equipment can be calibrated to ensure the standards are maintained. Drug-sniffing dogs have been added to that arsenal of equipment, and they are capable of doing the job, but there has been, as far as I know, no requirement that they be periodically tested to determine their ongoing accuracy. In other words, they aren't being recalibrated or tested once they've been issued to document that they remain accurate under field conditions.
I've been around animals all my life. They can be trained to do any number of things, some of them bordering on amazing. But training an animal is not like programming a computer or setting a dial, most of them don't remain 'trained' unless the training is regularly and properly reinforced.
I was returning from a visit to friends in Ireland some years ago when I was asked to briefly assist in the training of a drug-sniffing dog at LAX. I was wearing cargo pants, (BDUs, actually, paperbacks fit very nicely in the side pockets), and I was approached by an officer who asked if I would allow him to put a package in one pocket so the dog hidden down the hall could be tested. I told him that as long as he told the other officers that he was the one who put it there, I was happy to help. Went like clockwork. I walked casually, the dog and handler came out of their hiding place, also moving casually, and the dog alerted as he passed me. Perfect.
We've been seeing more and more law enforcement agencies purchasing these very expensive drug-sniffing dogs to extend their capabilities for investigating without being directly invasive. But how many of those agencies are seeing the purchase as primarily a way of increasing their revenue in a time of tight budgets? How much does a dog have to bring in in fines, seizures, pleas and convictions before the return on investment is sufficient to justify the expense? And how can we be sure that they are maintained as true assets to law enforcement and not just additional avenues for abusing seizure laws and trumping up false prosecutions?
We've seen dash cam footage of officers conducting searches improperly, cuing their dogs to alert instead of allowing the dog to do its job and alert when they genuinely detect contraband. It seems to me that we should require all such canine investigations to be done on video and therefor be available for professional review, as well as periodic testing of the dogs themselves by an independent source to assure that the handler is not de-calibrating the dogs either with substandard handling techniques or actual bad faith actions.
Law enforcement has to keep records of the brands and calibration of their hardware, radar guns, etc, the organic equipment can and should have their calibrations checked and documented as well to assure that their accuracy is sufficient to warrant the trust placed in their results.
After all, if they're not doing anything wrong, they shouldn't have any objections to being observed and their animals' accuracy documented, should they? ;-)
Update: Okay, after doing legwork I should have done first, it appears, according to National Geographic, that there is no national standard for certification of detection dogs, some agencies have standards for certification and some don't. Also the US Supreme Court ruled in March of this year that detection dogs cannot be used outside private homes without a warrant. So there is room for improvement and standardization all around.